Five ways Congress should improve the copyright system

In a Wednesday speech, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) announced plans for a "comprehensive review" of copyright law. The announcement is significant because Goodlatte chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over copyright issues.

"I am announcing today that the House Judiciary Committee will hold a comprehensive series of hearings on US copyright law in the months ahead," Goodlatte said. "The goal of these hearings will be to determine whether the laws are still working in the digital age. I welcome all interested parties to submit their views and concerns to the Committee."

Goodlatte cited recent comments by Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante as an inspiration for his initiative. And he drew a parallel to work by one of Pallante's predecessors, Thorvald Solberg, which culminated in a major overhaul of copyright law in 1909.

So here are five suggestions for improving copyright law that Congress ought to consider. These ideas may be more ambitious than Goodlatte has in mind, but dramatic changes are needed if we want the copyright system to truly promote, rather than hinder, creativity.

Bring proportionality back to copyright penalties

Over the last three decades, Congress has repeatedly increased the penalties for copyright infringement. As a result, copyright infringement is now punishable by as much as $150,000 per work.

These disproportionate penalties have had devastating consequences for both individuals and businesses. A decade ago, the threat of having to pay as much as $150,000 per work forced the pioneering locker service MP3.com to settle its lawsuit with major labels before it had a chance to appeal.

Single mother Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been fighting six-figure penalties for close to a decade in one of the few file-sharing cases to make it into a courtroom. She is accused of sharing just 24 songs, which have a retail value of around $24.

And the threat of astronomical damages has been a potent weapon in the hands of copyright trolls like Prenda Law. Prenda's Paul Duffy pointed to the $222,000 verdict against Thomas-Rasset as a cautionary tale in his communications with alleged infringers.

Penalties for copyright infringement are appropriate, but the punishment should fit the crime. The current penalties are at least an order of magnitude too large.

Rein in asset forfeiture in copyright cases

In January 2012, the federal government froze the worldwide assets of file-sharing site Megaupload and its founder, Kim Dotcom. The operation was made possible by the 2008 PRO-IP Act, which for the first time gave the government broad authority to use the power of civil asset forfeiture in copyright cases.

The seizures amounted to a corporate death sentence for Megaupload. With no cash, the firm was forced to lay off its employees. Legitimate users who relied on the service suddenly lost access to their data with no recourse.

Dotcom hasn't been the only target of copyright-related asset seizures. In 2010, the government seized a hip-hop blog called Dajaz1, holding it for almost a year before finally returning it. Evidently, the government didn't have a case against its owner.

Dajaz1 was just one of hundreds of domain names seized by the government over the last three years as part of "Operation In Our Sites." While many of these sites do appear to have been engaged in illegal activities, it's troubling that the government has the power to shut them down before their owners have any opportunity to defend themselves.

Megaupload may be guilty of copyright infringement, but the firm should have had its day in court before having its assets seized and its site shut down. The operator of Dajaz1 should have had a chance to respond to the government's accusations before losing control of his site.

Pre-conviction asset seizures may be appropriate in conventional piracy cases where, for example, the government finds a warehouse full of pirated DVDs. But the tactic is simply too crude a weapon to use against websites and online services.

Reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Modern music software such as iTunes has long included a feature to rip your CD collection onto your computer. Yet almost two decades after DVDs were introduced, legal software to rip them is not available.

The difference is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Congress passed in 1998. It criminalizes circumvention of copy protection schemes like the Content Scrambling System found on DVDs. The result has been stunted progress in digital media technologies. Firms that have tried to develop innovative technology related to the DVD without the permission of the DVD cartel have faced ruinous lawsuits.

Even worse, the DMCA has been wielded to limit user freedom in areas that have no plausible connection to piracy. In 2012, the Librarian of Congress sparked outrage when it changed DMCA-related regulations to effectively make it illegal to unlock a cell phone in order to take it to another carrier. In another case, Blizzard used the DMCA to shut down the use of a World of Warcraft bot.

Recently, some members of Congress have proposed narrow legislation to legalize cell phone unlocking. But the deeper problem is the DMCA's anti-circumvention rule itself. Congress should narrow the DMCA's restrictions on circumvention, and should consider repealing the provisions altogether.

Reduce copyright terms

America's original copyright system granted authors 14 years of protection with the option to renew for an additional 14 years. By the mid-20th Century, that had been expanded to a 28-year initial term and another 28 years after renewal. But since 1976, we've been in an era of perpetual copyrights. Congress added 20 years to older works and changed the term for new works to the life of the author plus 50 years. In 1998, Congress retroactively extended copyright terms by another 20 years.

As a result, the public domain has been practically frozen for forty years. If a work was under copyright in 1978, it will probably still be under copyright in 2018.

It's a virtual certainty that major copyright holders will seek yet another extension of copyright terms before 2018. Congress should not only refuse to grant another extension, but it should consider reducing the terms already in effect. Copyright protections that last more than a century are far more than are necessary to accomplish copyright's function of encouraging creativity.

Create a mandatory database of copyrighted works

For most of the 20th century, getting copyright protection for a work required marking it with a copyright notice and registering it with the Library of Congress. Authors also had to renew their works after 28 years in order to keep copyright protection.

But starting in 1976, Congress eliminated these requirements, known as "formalities." Today, almost everything you write—your emails, your diary, and sketches you draw on cocktail napkins—are copyrighted, whether you want them to be or not. And that protection could last for more than a century with no renewal requirement.

The result has been a huge "orphan works" problem. Thousands of books, films, and other works created in the mid-20th Century are deteriorating on our library shelves. Digitization and republication could give these works a second lease on life, but doing so is legally hazardous because no one can figure out who holds the copyrights. The problem will only get worse as works published after 1978 start to show their age. These works may not even have a copyright notice to identify their authors.

One argument for eliminating the registration and renewal requirements was that they created too much of a burden for authors. But registration need not be burdensome in the age of the Internet. Registration could be done online and the Librarian of Congress could charge a nominal fee such as $1. Renewal could be as simple as logging into the Librarian of Congress's website and updating an author's contact information—the Librarian of Congress could even send out helpful e-mail reminders when a work comes up for renewal.

Congress should once again require registration as a pre-condition of copyright protection and periodic renewal to keep copyright protection in effect. That would allow the Library of Congress to build a national database of copyrighted works. People who wanted to use older works would either be able to use the database to identify a work's owners, or to verify that the work has fallen into the public domain and was free for anyone to copy.

164 Reader Comments

About the last proposition "database", two remarks : 1) The database is important not only for copyright owner, but also for the simple sake of keeping the intellectual wealth for our descendant. 2)aboout all the anxieties about the "small authors" ; I am sure it is possible to find a flexible way of doing. For example setting up a "copyright container" : buying a 1$ "copyright container" that you can fill month after month. You buy your container for, say, 1 000 photos, and then whenever you have new photos you load them to your container. After you have registered 1000 photos, or, say, one year from starting your container whatever the number of photos, this container is considered finished and locked. This copyright container could be adapted to blogs, too.

About the usefulness of 100 + years of copyright as an encouragement to author : Of course such long period have no direct effect on authors.

To show it, I suggest to film an author going to its bank and proposing to exchange the future rights (for the next hundred years) on a document he/she is writing (/playing/phtographing/filming) in exchange for a bank loan of 10 000$ to 100 000$. Please it is important to focus on the face of the banker when you first express the proposition. Then repeat it. And may be it is important to show when they start to laugh.

Unless of course, you are already a well recognized author. By which time you require much less encouragement, by the way, because you are laready earning your living out of your work.

Congress should once again require registration as a pre-condition of copyright protection

Isn't that effectively the way it is now?

Yes, but right now the whole thing is a mess. All original, creative works are copyrighted by default from the moment they're "fixed" in a tangible medium. Meanwhile, you have to register the work in order to be able to receive statutory damages should you later take someone to court for infringing the copyright. So yes, in practice, if a work is not registered then the copyright holder is highly unlikely to attempt to enforce it in the face of infringement, unless that infringement is a) massive, and b) reasonably quantifiable. The end result of this, though, is that nobody other than large companies who can afford to track down the copyright owner and negotiate licensing wants to risk going ahead and making use of a work, because the potential liability is too great.

The current state of affairs is both ambiguous and overly complex. Ask any documentary film-maker, for example, what they think about the system of clearing works and licensing them for use in their films. They'll tell you that it's the no. 1 barrier to getting the film made. Since 1976, it's nearly impossible to get financing for such projects (unless you're lucky enough to attract major studio/distribution interest) precisely because of this "copyrighted-by-default-plus-registry" situation. Requiring registration in order to have your work copyrighted at all would go a long way to solving that problem: if you want to use some or all of a work in your new creation then you can look it up in the registry and if it isn't there, or the registry shows that its term has expired, you're free to use it however you like. And if it is there, you can get the information you need to contact the copyright holder and negotiate its use. Simple, effective and accessible to all.

Further, requiring registration by default also solves a problem for people who create stuff but don't want it to be copyrighted to begin with. As it stands, they have to explicitly declare the work to be subject to looser terms than the default "protect all". But even if they do, without registration of that work, the average person cannot necessarily rely on some random declaration on some random website as sufficiently authoritative for them to go ahead and use the work without fear of getting sued. This creates a chilling effect. Requiring registration solves that problem as well.

Auto copyright could still work if we had mandatory registration of the artist and then mandatory inclusion of the artists copyright ID number with any material they really want to control. Really the biggest issue with auto copyright is that you can't easily track down the artist to ask for copy permission. If it was mandatory to include the artist ID in order to control your work, then auto copyright would be fine with me.

It should also be mandatory for any image processing systems in various web sites to transfer the metadata over when they resize and display images and videos on websites.

Edit:Furthermore the author database could help with communication. It could offer an option to auto respond with approval of copyright as long as the form was properly filled out. For artists only wanting to know when and where their stuff was used, this would be nice and also cut down on hassle. The default option would require for individual approval and offer options to request payment (even an auto fixed price request). However, requests that are ignored more than 30 days would be granted tentative approval due to lack of communication and then automatic full approval after 90 days. This would help prevent artists from being lazy and simply not communicating.

I'm not sure I would be in favor of an auto rejection option for approval as that would basically make the database useless from a communication stand point. The point of copyright seems to be for the artists to make money. So if an artist is not interested in making money or if they have their own method of making money that makes sharing unnecessary, the least they could do is communicate it.

I try to be polite, but your post is the worst sort of uninformed FUD. It's like you just made up some arguments off the top of your head, and didn't even check to see if they were supported by the facts

FUD,

I think you don't understand how actual and statutory damages are awarded. Or that the possibility of severe punishment is routinely used to win settlements in all sorts of cases, that copyright infringement hasn't been singled out for special punishments. Or that companies use incorporation to limit their seizable assets? Or that not registering a work in the present copyright regime is a positive assertion of one's rights, not passive neglect of them? Or the economics of database management.

Infringed rightsholders do sue for actual damages but the damages can be extraordinarily difficult to determine. How many illegal copies of Born to Run are there? How many illegal copies of your articles? They're uncountable, so to provide something like fair compensation for infringed rightsholders, the US allows a rightsholder to qualify (not necessarily win) statutory damages. The court then decides whether or not to award the damages and, if they are awarded, how large they will be. So statutory damages are limited in three ways: you must qualify for eligibility, which is non-trivial; you must convince the court to award them even though you are eligible, which is also non-trivial; and you cannot be awarded more than the statutory limit.

As for seizing all of a corporation's assets, the corporation holding an infringement web site is highly unlikely to hold any assets other than the files, a bank account, and a few desks and computers. It's likely to lease server space, often in tax-shelter countries, or use the cloud, and to skim off all but daily operating funds to its corporate parent. So seizing all the corporation's assets isn't the draconian penalty you seem to feel it is. The seizure makes good sense and good law. As well, the threat of seizure can win a settlement, of course.

And fair use and Google? Please. Talk about contradictory. Republishing works without permission in order to increase ad revenue is hardly fair use. That Google seduced major libraries into joining its project doesn't turn Google into an angel. It only demonstrates its craftiness.

And as for mandatory registration, it might seem to be a practical solution, but the size of it is daunting. The Register of Copyrights remarked last year at a conference at the University of California-Berkeley that there's little likelihood that Congress would fund even an expansion of the present database or that the Register would want it to, and there's no way in the forseeable future, she said, that it would fund an expansion of the size needed by mandatory registration. So that's off the table.

What's more, if registering a work means rightsholders want people to use it, not registering means they don't want or expect people to use it. Not registering isn't neglect, it's a positive assertion of one's rights that should not be over-ruled because someone disagrees with the owner's view. Mandatory registration would expose rightsholders to unwanted solicitations. Do you enjoy getting spam?

All in all, I believe what's needed is an out-of-the-box solution to compensation, not copyright. Musicians, actors, playwrights and similar rightsholders are compensated when their works are performed. In Norway, authors are compensated when their books are borrowed from libraries. I think it's more important to develop new compensation schemes in media lacking them than it is to overhaul copyright, which is as much a tool for managing compensation as anything else.

And just as an aside, though it's related, the US and UK are among a very small number of countries where copyright is viewed as fundamentally a practical matter. In most of the world, it's viewed as an inalienable natural right of creators, and this is the view mandated even here by international treaties the US has signed.

I fail to perceive in any way how my creativity has ever - been restricted or hindered as the result of copyright law. In school I learned Mr. Lee; how finger-paint, how to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and how to write my very own sentences. I have had little difficulty in either understanding or employing the limitation to copyright law called ‘fair use'.

Regarding these five proposed areas of copyright reform, admittedly a couple of your ideas do make sense. Your appeal for a day in court before the act of a club fisted asset seizure, is admirable. Copyright protections exceeding a century are questionable but; is a century "far more than" necessary to protect copyright's function? After all if science and healthcare trends continue to improve as they have, some of the yuppies and later in this audience could live to some 'ripe old ages' indeed.

Perhaps introducing the inflated plight of Jammie Thomas-Rasset was an error. The $220,000 in statutory penalties seem perfectly reasonable to anyone vaguely familiar with how this particular judicial system actually works. The first trial alone consumed a good amount of money - and there were 3 jury trials. Couldn't you have stated that she was determined guilty and liable by these courts rather than presenting her anew as being questionably accused? She could have settled for $5,000 a long time ago, or could have had less contempt for IP to begin with. The courts found her violations "blatant", "unapologetic" and "willful in the extreme". Rather than her just sharing 24 songs worth about $1 a piece, the reader might have been reminded that she eagerly distributed thousands more, in all probability. On the taxpayer's dollar she has entreated both the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court and lost. Jammie hasn't paid any penalty and won't. I am unmoved by the plight of her disproportionate copyright penalties. Your MP3.com example was better.

If you and others want to mandate a database of currently registered copyrights then that infrastructure will cost money. I like the suggestion that you, the public, the inheritors of public domain should pay for such an institution and not the creators. The effort necessary by a creator to protect personal IP should not require more than mailing in a stamped envelope.

The publishers, game designers, record companies, film makers and the like need realistic protections to continue to provide consumer grade content. While authors, artist, songwriters and inventors are only individuals, significant amounts of pertinent creative content is now being created by teams of people. To penetrate the fickle mass-consumption market of this Orwellian/Utopian society requires perception, financial backing, business acumen and a willingness to take risk. Without the reassurance of copyright law - why should these teams or companies even bother? Where will the next operating system or huge movie production come from when, the absence of copyright will allow any John Doe to legally pirate and distribute same before a legitimate product even gets to market? To a rational mind this situation would more than hinder – but would utterly suffocate such joint creativity.

I fail to perceive in any way how my creativity has ever - been restricted or hindered as the result of copyright law. In school I learned Mr. Lee; how finger-paint, how to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and how to write my very own sentences. I have had little difficulty in either understanding or employing the limitation to copyright law called ‘fair use'.

Regarding these five proposed areas of copyright reform, admittedly a couple of your ideas do make sense. Your appeal for a day in court before the act of a club fisted asset seizure, is admirable. Copyright protections exceeding a century are questionable but; is a century "far more than" necessary to protect copyright's function? After all if science and healthcare trends continue to improve as they have, some of the yuppies and later in this audience could live to some 'ripe old ages' indeed.

Perhaps introducing the inflated plight of Jammie Thomas-Rasset was an error. The $220,000 in statutory penalties seem perfectly reasonable to anyone vaguely familiar with how this particular judicial system actually works. The first trial alone consumed a good amount of money - and there were 3 jury trials. Couldn't you have stated that she was determined guilty and liable by these courts rather than presenting her anew as being questionably accused? She could have settled for $5,000 a long time ago, or could have had less contempt for IP to begin with. The courts found her violations "blatant", "unapologetic" and "willful in the extreme". Rather than her just sharing 24 songs worth about $1 a piece, the reader might have been reminded that she eagerly distributed thousands more, in all probability. On the taxpayer's dollar she has entreated both the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court and lost. Jammie hasn't paid any penalty and won't. I am unmoved by the plight of her disproportionate copyright penalties. Your MP3.com example was better.

If you and others want to mandate a database of currently registered copyrights then that infrastructure will cost money. I like the suggestion that you, the public, the inheritors of public domain should pay for such an institution and not the creators. The effort necessary by a creator to protect personal IP should not require more than mailing in a stamped envelope.

The publishers, game designers, record companies, film makers and the like need realistic protections to continue to provide consumer grade content. While authors, artist, songwriters and inventors are only individuals, significant amounts of pertinent creative content is now being created by teams of people. To penetrate the fickle mass-consumption market of this Orwellian/Utopian society requires perception, financial backing, business acumen and a willingness to take risk. Without the reassurance of copyright law - why should these teams or companies even bother? Where will the next operating system or huge movie production come from when, the absence of copyright will allow any John Doe to legally pirate and distribute same before a legitimate product even gets to market? To a rational mind this situation would more than hinder – but would utterly suffocate such joint creativity.

They need protection? That's not even close to being true. Do you know why? It's because you and everyone else like you can't think outside of that little box of copyright supported business model. You're so utterly convinced that the one and only way to ever make a business in content is by restricting access to copies and selling them as individual units of product. It's absolutely ludicrous because content is not an inventory of ready to ship products waiting to hit store shelves. They are speech. They are the vehicle for the author's expression of his ideas in order to transmit them to the audience. They are about as unlike a discreet unit of property or product as anything could be. What's more, is that it's also a delusion to think that this backwards, unrealistic business model should be protected by government policy. It doesn't deserve to be protected since it only enables a single brain-dead and seriously flawed business model. To say that authors deserve to own their works is like saying that someone that built a house on a state park deserves to own the land it sits on. The point is, every author appropriates the works of the past in order to build their own (*cough*Disney*cough*). Nobody creates content from nothing. Everything builds on everything else. That is a pure and immutable fact. To grant ownership over content is to, by extension, grant the author ownership of everything that his works are built on, which is a whole hell of a lot.

The copyright model is horribly flawed. It leans heavily on the assumption that the author is the only one physically capable of distributing copies of their works. We know that is as false as George Washington's teeth. It also assumes that a monopoly will encourage more works. Take a look at the chart of books published between the 1930's to 1990's that are still in print on Amazon.com compared to the number of published books from prior to 1930 that are still in print. Guess what, the books from the 20th century have far fewer reprints today as their pre-20th century counterparts. So that excuse is blown apart. Then there is the assumption that copyright ensures authors will be able to succeed in the market than without. That's another baseless delusion. Great art proliferates because it is great art and the artist has seen to it that what they do is worth supporting, not because the law granted a monopoly on a work. Copyright doesn't doesn't turn a lousy artist into a star anymore than a lack of it would make a star destitute. That ties into the misplaced fear that "without copyright everybody will just steal everyone's hard work and not pay anything for it." That goes back to my first point: copyright business models rely on nobody else being able to make and distribute copies. Well, people can and they do, because it's really damn easy.

So what's the solution to people copying and not paying for it? That's an easy answer, don't sell copies. "But how does the artist make money if he doesn't sell his work?", you may ask? Well gee, I don't know. There must not be anything else related to their work that is worth any money. Wait, what's that old saying, "time is money", isn't it? So it would seem it stands to reason that if artists sold their time at its perceived market value, they could run their business that way. Who would have thought that time and labor were valuable and marketable assets? Oh, that's right, our entire society. So if you calculate how much it costs you to live (food, shelter, bills, luxuries), add all the overhead tied to your work, and break that into an hourly rate, you can figure out how much to charge for any project of any time span. If you're worth $50 an hour and you're working on a project that will take 1,000 hours to complete before publishing, then the price of your labor for that project is $50,000. And when you figure out how to convince your audience that you are worth that, you can get paid, do the job, and give away the published work without feeling the least bit cheated. Why? Because you got paid for the work you actually did, not by trying to recoup the investment you made by selling a highly vulnerable product. If they didn't pay your fee, you wouldn't have lifted a finger and moved on to something else. Under this model, you'll never be at a loss on work you did because you did the work you were paid to do and nothing more.

I try to be polite, but your post is the worst sort of uninformed FUD. It's like you just made up some arguments off the top of your head, and didn't even check to see if they were supported by the facts

Infringed rightsholders do sue for actual damages but the damages can be extraordinarily difficult to determine. How many illegal copies of Born to Run are there? How many illegal copies of your articles? They're uncountable, so to provide something like fair compensation for infringed rightsholders, the US allows a rightsholder to qualify (not necessarily win) statutory damages. The court then decides whether or not to award the damages and, if they are awarded, how large they will be. So statutory damages are limited in three ways: you must qualify for eligibility, which is non-trivial; you must convince the court to award them even though you are eligible, which is also non-trivial; and you cannot be awarded more than the statutory limit.

By all means explain to us how this 'non-trivial' process for qualifying for eligibility works.

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As for seizing all of a corporation's assets, the corporation holding an infringement web site is highly unlikely to hold any assets other than the files, a bank account, and a few desks and computers. It's likely to lease server space, often in tax-shelter countries, or use the cloud, and to skim off all but daily operating funds to its corporate parent. So seizing all the corporation's assets isn't the draconian penalty you seem to feel it is. The seizure makes good sense and good law. As well, the threat of seizure can win a settlement, of course.

1. Since civil forfeiture occurs before any sort of trial, the corporation is only holding an 'allegedly infringing' website. No court has ruled on the matter, and the corporation has had no chance to argue that they're not infringing.

2. don't tell me that civil forfeiture isn't draconian, tell the people who woke up one morning without a website, without their data, without any idea what happened, and without any means of doing anything about it...for years.

Civil forfeiture makes good sense only to multi-national copyright-holding corporations and people who don't care about serious due process problems.

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And fair use and Google? Please. Talk about contradictory. Republishing works without permission in order to increase ad revenue is hardly fair use. That Google seduced major libraries into joining its project doesn't turn Google into an angel. It only demonstrates its craftiness.

Google v Perfect10A V et al v iParadigms, LLC

You are, of course, free to hold your own opinion about whether Google's project is fair use, but a judge must make the final ruling, and judges have made rulings in a number of cases, which support arguments that Google Books is not, in fact, infringing.

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And as for mandatory registration, it might seem to be a practical solution, but the size of it is daunting. The Register of Copyrights remarked last year at a conference at the University of California-Berkeley that there's little likelihood that Congress would fund even an expansion of the present database or that the Register would want it to, and there's no way in the forseeable future, she said, that it would fund an expansion of the size needed by mandatory registration. So that's off the table.

Let me get this straight: you're arguing that in some hypothetical world where congress gave the middle finger to the Berne conventions prohibition on mandatory registration, this same congress would refuse to fund the mandatory registration system that they implemented? Or are you arguing that our current congress, which wouldn't even consider violating the Berne convention, wouldn't fund a bigger registry? I completely agree with the second.

Yes, the size of the database would be huge. The federal government manages huge databases every day, largely successfully. If they had the will to enact mandatory registration, I see no reason to claim, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, that they would fail to have the will to fund such an enterprise. Mind, it's obvious that the current congress and Registrar of copyright has zero interest in such a task, so that's not much of an objection to the plan.

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What's more, if registering a work means rightsholders want people to use it, not registering means they don't want or expect people to use it. Not registering isn't neglect, it's a positive assertion of one's rights that should not be over-ruled because someone disagrees with the owner's view. Mandatory registration would expose rightsholders to unwanted solicitations. Do you enjoy getting spam?

One always has the option to not register the copyright, if receiving unsolicited offers of payment is so odious and burdensome. One can also ignore any and all offers of payment which they receive, after registering.

Perhaps the author could see if his suggestions can be brought up at the next Condé Nast board meeting?

If the current penalties are "an order of magnitude too large," then is Condé Nast willing to publicly pledge that it will never seek more than $15K/work in any future copyright infringement lawsuits it might bring?

How soon is Condé Nast willing to put its copyrighted materials into the public domain, forgoing the lengthy copyright terms? (Condé Nast publications go back over 100 years.)

Does Condé Nast currently register the copyright for each article it publishes? If not, is it willing to start?

If these ideas make sense to a major content creator and distributor, then you might have something. If not, ...

I have over 400 images over two sites. Admittedly, I'm not that great of an artist, so the likelihood of them being used is virtually nil. Still, that's $400+ to make sure that I retain the copyright of those images, and I have to register any images before I put them online to make sure that others don't just download it and stick it on a t-shirt (again, the odds of that happening are nil, but it's the principle of the thing and paranoia is funny like that.)

Imagine what would happen to sites like DeviantArt (which for all the crap in it, has a lot of good stuff) and Conceptart.org. Artists in the know would simply stop posting their finished works or at all because of the possibility that their images would be used without permission, unless they went through this process each time.

I'm not saying that part of copyright doesn't need to change, but perhaps limiting automatic copyright to paintings, photographs, drawings, prose, poetry, and other types of art would be better than getting rid of it entirely.

How about granting you automatic copyright for 14 years, then renewal in 14 year terms at a cost of $1 per term? You'd get easy copyright for all your blog ephemera, but if the work hadn't acquired sufficient value in 14 years for it to be worth a single dollar to protect, then it can revert to the public?

I've often wished for a way to license my own blog posts this way, actually. Creative Commons used to offer a Founders' License that worked very much like this, but they've since given up on it.

"In a Wednesday speech, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) announced plans for a "comprehensive review" of copyright law. The announcement is significant because Goodlatte chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over copyright issues."

Now let's consider this is just another arm of the lobbying industry which will summon all of his fellow "arms" and, perhaps pass some legislation. That legislation will be drafted by the lobbyists and represent all that we consumers do not want.

Perhaps the author could see if his suggestions can be brought up at the next Condé Nast board meeting?

If the current penalties are "an order of magnitude too large," then is Condé Nast willing to publicly pledge that it will never seek more than $15K/work in any future copyright infringement lawsuits it might bring?

How soon is Condé Nast willing to put its copyrighted materials into the public domain, forgoing the lengthy copyright terms? (Condé Nast publications go back over 100 years.)

Does Condé Nast currently register the copyright for each article it publishes? If not, is it willing to start?

If these ideas make sense to a major content creator and distributor, then you might have something. If not, ...

...then Gisboth has set up a bizarre, over-simplified, straw-man so as to imply that the author is somewhere between a hypocrite and simply full of shit?

Or do you honestly think that there's no difference (just to choose one aspect of your post) between one company unilaterally changing their stance on copyright (giving every competitor a significant advantage over them in the market), and the government doing so for all competitors?

RE your citations, Google v Perfect10 was won on appeal, cited as Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. The court held that creating thumbnails to aid in listing search-engine hits was fair use. That's not very helpful for Google's republishing of whole works. Your second citation, A V et al v iParadigms, LLC, cited on appeal as Vanderhye v. iParadigms LLC, is more helpful to you. The court held that a firm reviewing student papers for plagiarism was protected by fair use. The use was transformative and did not injure the papers' marketability. But a better citation for your argument is last October's Hathitrust decision. The court ruled that scanning and republishing academic works by Hathitrust, a non-profit educational consortium, was fair on all four criteria. Google isn't non-profit, of course, but the decision contradicts numerous precedents on a couple of counts, so we'll have to see how this issue plays out.

"In a Wednesday speech, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) announced plans for a "comprehensive review" of copyright law. The announcement is significant because Goodlatte chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over copyright issues."

Now let's consider this is just another arm of the lobbying industry which will summon all of his fellow "arms" and, perhaps pass some legislation. That legislation will be drafted by the lobbyists and represent all that we consumers do not want.

No, pretty much everyone involved realizes that the purpose of the review is to increase access to copyrighted works, not restrict it. It's going to be an interesting battle.

They need protection? That's not even close to being true. Do you know why? It's because you and everyone else like you can't think outside of that little box of copyright supported business model. You're so utterly convinced that the one and only way to ever make a business in content is by restricting access to copies and selling them as individual units of product.

So what is this super special business model you have in mind? If you have it there are tons of media companies that would love to hire you right this second.

But the reality is content does not make money when given away for free. Newspapers are dead because they gave content away for free on the internet. NY Times has again had to push back its date of profitability and its the freaking NYT. You think the Nashville what ever their local paper is has a chance? Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime make about nothing. The musicians (top selling acts with loyal fan bases) failed with pay what you like.

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It's absolutely ludicrous because content is not an inventory of ready to ship products waiting to hit store shelves. They are speech. They are the vehicle for the author's expression of his ideas in order to transmit them to the audience. They are about as unlike a discreet unit of property or product as anything could be. What's more, is that it's also a delusion to think that this backwards, unrealistic business model should be protected by government policy.

I agree as long as you are talking about passive ownership in companies. Why should Paris Hilton make money form her Hilton stocks she is not involved in the business in any way.

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To say that authors deserve to own their works is like saying that someone that built a house on a state park deserves to own the land it sits on.

You don't go far enough. There should be no private real estate because without government there would be no such thing. Its an artificial "right".

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The point is, every author appropriates the works of the past in order to build their own (*cough*Disney*cough*). Nobody creates content from nothing. Everything builds on everything else. That is a pure and immutable fact. To grant ownership over content is to, by extension, grant the author ownership of everything that his works are built on, which is a whole hell of a lot.

Hahahaha. Nice that you want to destroy IP laws when you don't even understand them. Disney does not get to copyright Snow White. They can only copyright the ideas as presented in their version of the film. This means stuff like eating an apple is a ok for anyone to use. The use of the songs from Disney version on the other hand are copywrited by Disney because they are an original compensation. Sure it might have been influenced by some prior song but Disney may or may not have the copyright to those songs.

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The copyright model is horribly flawed. It leans heavily on the assumption that the author is the only one physically capable of distributing copies of their works. We know that is as false as George Washington's teeth.

Huh? What?

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It also assumes that a monopoly will encourage more works. Take a look at the chart of books published between the 1930's to 1990's that are still in print on Amazon.com compared to the number of published books from prior to 1930 that are still in print. Guess what, the books from the 20th century have far fewer reprints today as their pre-20th century counterparts. So that excuse is blown apart. Then there is the assumption that copyright ensures authors will be able to succeed in the market than without.

WHat again? How about this one. Every time more protection is given to Copyrights there is more content per person being produced. Counties with strong copyright protection are the countries that produce the most IP.

The TLTR version. America kicks the shit out of China when it comes to producing content.

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That's another baseless delusion. Great art proliferates because it is great art and the artist has seen to it that what they do is worth supporting, not because the law granted a monopoly on a work. Copyright doesn't doesn't turn a lousy artist into a star anymore than a lack of it would make a star destitute. That ties into the misplaced fear that "without copyright everybody will just steal everyone's hard work and not pay anything for it." That goes back to my first point: copyright business models rely on nobody else being able to make and distribute copies. Well, people can and they do, because it's really damn easy.

Leonardo Di Vinci was forced to work as an engineer in order to paint. Michelangelo was forced to paint in order to sculpt. These being the 2 most famous examples of artist that had to work outside of the field depriving the world of works that they might have wanted to create because there was no Copyright protection.

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So what's the solution to people copying and not paying for it? That's an easy answer, don't sell copies. "But how does the artist make money if he doesn't sell his work?", you may ask? Well gee, I don't know. There must not be anything else related to their work that is worth any money. Wait, what's that old saying, "time is money", isn't it? So it would seem it stands to reason that if artists sold their time at its perceived market value, they could run their business that way. Who would have thought that time and labor were valuable and marketable assets? Oh, that's right, our entire society. So if you calculate how much it costs you to live (food, shelter, bills, luxuries), add all the overhead tied to your work, and break that into an hourly rate, you can figure out how much to charge for any project of any time span. If you're worth $50 an hour and you're working on a project that will take 1,000 hours to complete before publishing, then the price of your labor for that project is $50,000. And when you figure out how to convince your audience that you are worth that, you can get paid, do the job, and give away the published work without feeling the least bit cheated. Why? Because you got paid for the work you actually did, not by trying to recoup the investment you made by selling a highly vulnerable product. If they didn't pay your fee, you wouldn't have lifted a finger and moved on to something else. Under this model, you'll never be at a loss on work you did because you did the work you were paid to do and nothing more.

:It also assumes that a monopoly will encourage more works. Take a look at the chart of books published between the 1930's to 1990's that are still in print on Amazon.com compared to the number of published books from prior to 1930 that are still in print. Guess what, the books from the 20th century have far fewer reprints today as their pre-20th century counterparts. So that excuse is blown apart. Then there is the assumption that copyright ensures authors will be able to succeed in the market than without.

WHat again? How about this one. Every time more protection is given to Copyrights there is more content per person being produced. Counties with strong copyright protection are the countries that produce the most IP.

The TLTR version. America kicks the shit out of China when it comes to producing content.

Which really has nothing to do with the length of copyright protection. People create because they need to, and have the ability to create without starving. Even without the protection of copyright, people would still create. The US is richer than China, so it's really not surprising that we create more.

All that tells me is that in order to qualify for statutory damages, you must:a) be the copyright holderb) ask for statutory damages before final judgement is rendered.

Tells me nothing about how trivial or non-trivial it is to qualify for statutory damages. Remember, you claimed that eligibility for statutory damages is non-trivial. Perhaps you meant it's non-trivial because you have to be able to afford a federal lawsuit? Perhaps you meant that it's really, really hard to register your copyright with the Copyright Office (Section 408)?

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RE your citations, Google v Perfect10 was won on appeal, cited as Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. The court held that creating thumbnails to aid in listing search-engine hits was fair use. That's not very helpful for Google's republishing of whole works. Your second citation, A V et al v iParadigms, LLC, cited on appeal as Vanderhye v. iParadigms LLC, is more helpful to you. The court held that a firm reviewing student papers for plagiarism was protected by fair use. The use was transformative and did not injure the papers' marketability. But a better citation for your argument is last October's Hathitrust decision. The court ruled that scanning and republishing academic works by Hathitrust, a non-profit educational consortium, was fair on all four criteria. Google isn't non-profit, of course, but the decision contradicts numerous precedents on a couple of counts, so we'll have to see how this issue plays out.

So, we've switched from

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Republishing works without permission in order to increase ad revenue is hardly fair use.

to

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...we'll have to see how this issue plays out.

I'm going to take this as an admission that your initial claims about fair use were incorrect. Thank you.

All that tells me is that in order to qualify for statutory damages, you must:a) be the copyright holderb) ask for statutory damages before final judgement is rendered.

Tells me nothing about how trivial or non-trivial it is to qualify for statutory damages. Remember, you claimed that eligibility for statutory damages is non-trivial. Perhaps you meant it's non-trivial because you have to be able to afford a federal lawsuit? Perhaps you meant that it's really, really hard to register your copyright with the Copyright Office (Section 408)?

There's more to it than that. You must register within 3 month of publication or 1 month of finding out about the infringement.

All that tells me is that in order to qualify for statutory damages, you must:a) be the copyright holderb) ask for statutory damages before final judgement is rendered.

Tells me nothing about how trivial or non-trivial it is to qualify for statutory damages. Remember, you claimed that eligibility for statutory damages is non-trivial. Perhaps you meant it's non-trivial because you have to be able to afford a federal lawsuit? Perhaps you meant that it's really, really hard to register your copyright with the Copyright Office (Section 408)?

There's more to it than that. You must register within 3 month of publication or 1 month of finding out about the infringement.

fwiw, I knew this stuff already. My point to zootsuit was that (s)he claimed that it was non-trivial to qualify for statutory damages, in the context of discussing whether or not it's a good idea to limit statutory damages. The implied argument was that it's already hard to qualify for statutory damages, so we shouldn't worry about limiting them.

The only non-trivial portion of the process, from where I sit, is the ability to actually pursue a copyright suit in the first place. The rest of it is firmly, IMO, in the 'trivial' category. Since the only non-trivial portion of the process is filing the lawsuit in the first place, which is required to access actual or statutory damages, I still don't think that zootsuit's argument is at all convincing. 'Contrived' seems a better adjective to me.

But the reality is content does not make money when given away for free. Newspapers are dead because they gave content away for free on the internet. NY Times has again had to push back its date of profitability and its the freaking NYT. You think the Nashville what ever their local paper is has a chance? Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime make about nothing. The musicians (top selling acts with loyal fan bases) failed with pay what you like.

I agree as long as you are talking about passive ownership in companies. Why should Paris Hilton make money form her Hilton stocks she is not involved in the business in any way.

That is absolutely false. You're clinging to the idea that the content is a product that you sell like it's a broom on the store shelf and therefore, giving away the content is giving away the product, which means you removed any reason for them to pay you. I have news for you, if you run your business with the assumption that your content is a product, you're already giving away the goods without getting people to pay for it when you publish it. All it takes is one copy to reach the hands of the public and BAM!, you've undermined your entire business model, because copying content in an age where we have computers everywhere connected to the internet makes it really damn easy to copy and distribute it. There isn't any amount of law or enforcement that's going to change that fact. If you publish your work and expect people to buy copies when they could just make their own, you're the fool giving his "product" away for free.

Hahahaha. Nice that you want to destroy IP laws when you don't even understand them. Disney does not get to copyright Snow White. They can only copyright the ideas as presented in their version of the film. This means stuff like eating an apple is a ok for anyone to use. The use of the songs from Disney version on the other hand are copywrited by Disney because they are an original compensation. Sure it might have been influenced by some prior song but Disney may or may not have the copyright to those songs. [/quote ]

You don't get it. The point is, that DIsney would not have Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and so on without using the works of others. Their entire fortune is based on ripping other people off. The Lord of the Rings films didn't even start production until the copyright on the books expired. The thing is, the companies that push so hard to have copyright, do so because they want to be free to exploit past works, but nobody can exploit them. They want to be exempt from others doing to them, what they did to everyone else. When they copy, it's justified. But when others try to copy them, it's theft. Don't you see the blatant hypocrisy in that line of thinking? Perhaps not, otherwise I wouldn't have to explain it now.

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The copyright model is horribly flawed. It leans heavily on the assumption that the author is the only one physically capable of distributing copies of their works. We know that is as false as George Washington's teeth.

I'll explain again and try to use small words so you can comprehend. Copyright supports one model. That model relies on the original author being the only person who can copy and distribute copies of his work. So that if he is the only source of copies, he can sell them like they're real objects. Copyright makes it so that content can be traded as actual physical products. Copyright makes a retail market for content possible, in theory. However it relies heavily on other people not being capable of making copies, which they obviously can.

WHat again? How about this one. Every time more protection is given to Copyrights there is more content per person being produced. Counties with strong copyright protection are the countries that produce the most IP.

The TLTR version. America kicks the shit out of China when it comes to producing content.

Wrong, totally wrong. India produces far more content than the US and they have very weak copyright enforcement, if any at all. Your logic fails you. The countries that produce the most content are the ones that either have broad freedom to create (India) or have greater access to creative tools (US). Americans may have had ever increasing copyright, but they've also been privy to ever improving technology that enables the least of us to create content that would have cost millions of dollars prior. With a computer, a camera, a suitable location, and some actors, I could produce a movie on a budget of less than a few thousand dollars and it could potentially be on par with hollywood production quality and Shakespereian quality writing. All it would take is sufficient effort, because the means for producing a hollywood quality movie is available on consumer grade equipment. It's all in how much effort you put in to it. So don't lay this red herring on me that copyright makes more content happen. That's a flat-out lie.

Leonardo Di Vinci was forced to work as an engineer in order to paint. Michelangelo was forced to paint in order to sculpt. These being the 2 most famous examples of artist that had to work outside of the field depriving the world of works that they might have wanted to create because there was no Copyright protection.

Only a fool would believe that copyright would convert an artist working a job on the side to being able to do art full-time if only he could have a monopoly on the art he creates. The only difference between an amateur artist and a professional artist is obscurity. The more popular an artist is, the more he can make doing his art. You obviously don't know the mechanisms of copyright law if you think that it can allow an amateur to work as a professional simply because people can't copy his work without making the slightest effort to improve his notoriety. Copyright is worth absolutely dick if nobody likes what you do. It won't make you famous or skillfull, that's up to the artist to take care of.

It only seems crazy because you don't understand in the slightest what the true nature of content is nor where the real value lies. You lack the congitive resources to grasp what is the true leverage an artist must market to his audience. When you realize that content is worthless as a product, you start to see that you have no choice but to figure out what is a marketable good. The logical conclusion is that it's your labor. Put simply, any work you do is by your will and your will alone. You cannot be forced to work for free. Therefore, if people want you to make art, they must pledge to pay you for it. Once you wrap your mind around that immutable truth, you can then formulate alternative business models.

So, yes you can give away the art you create, but only if you're smart enough to have people pay you for the time and labor you put into it. If your time is worth $100,000 for a particular work, then everyone interested in it will have to collectively pledge to you the money you require. So it doesn't matter that you give away the work, that's not what you're selling and you won't be denying yourself income if you do. You're selling your time. That's no different than hiring a photographer. You're not paying for the photos, you're paying for that person's skill and experience at taking high quality photos for you. You're paying for the time they spend taking those photos. Anybody that knows even a little about economics knows about opportunity costs. You can choose either A or B. However, choosing A means you lose out on having B. If a photographer must come take your photo, then that is time he can't be working another job that pays. So, logic dictates that if an artist is working on an art job, that's time they can't put in to working at a non-art job. So, that's what you use as market leverage. People want you do create art, so they'll have to pay you to do it. If they don't pay, you don't work. It's a simple as that. It means you will always get paid for the work you do and nobody will be able to get free work from you. It's logic that even a 1st grader could understand.

I try to be polite, but your post is the worst sort of uninformed FUD. It's like you just made up some arguments off the top of your head, and didn't even check to see if they were supported by the facts

FUD,

I think you don't understand how actual and statutory damages are awarded. Or that the possibility of severe punishment is routinely used to win settlements in all sorts of cases, that copyright infringement hasn't been singled out for special punishments. Or that companies use incorporation to limit their seizable assets? Or that not registering a work in the present copyright regime is a positive assertion of one's rights, not passive neglect of them? Or the economics of database management.

Infringed rightsholders do sue for actual damages but the damages can be extraordinarily difficult to determine. How many illegal copies of Born to Run are there? How many illegal copies of your articles? They're uncountable, so to provide something like fair compensation for infringed rightsholders, the US allows a rightsholder to qualify (not necessarily win) statutory damages. The court then decides whether or not to award the damages and, if they are awarded, how large they will be. So statutory damages are limited in three ways: you must qualify for eligibility, which is non-trivial; you must convince the court to award them even though you are eligible, which is also non-trivial; and you cannot be awarded more than the statutory limit.

As for seizing all of a corporation's assets, the corporation holding an infringement web site is highly unlikely to hold any assets other than the files, a bank account, and a few desks and computers. It's likely to lease server space, often in tax-shelter countries, or use the cloud, and to skim off all but daily operating funds to its corporate parent. So seizing all the corporation's assets isn't the draconian penalty you seem to feel it is. The seizure makes good sense and good law. As well, the threat of seizure can win a settlement, of course.

And fair use and Google? Please. Talk about contradictory. Republishing works without permission in order to increase ad revenue is hardly fair use. That Google seduced major libraries into joining its project doesn't turn Google into an angel. It only demonstrates its craftiness.

And as for mandatory registration, it might seem to be a practical solution, but the size of it is daunting. The Register of Copyrights remarked last year at a conference at the University of California-Berkeley that there's little likelihood that Congress would fund even an expansion of the present database or that the Register would want it to, and there's no way in the forseeable future, she said, that it would fund an expansion of the size needed by mandatory registration. So that's off the table.

What's more, if registering a work means rightsholders want people to use it, not registering means they don't want or expect people to use it. Not registering isn't neglect, it's a positive assertion of one's rights that should not be over-ruled because someone disagrees with the owner's view. Mandatory registration would expose rightsholders to unwanted solicitations. Do you enjoy getting spam?

All in all, I believe what's needed is an out-of-the-box solution to compensation, not copyright. Musicians, actors, playwrights and similar rightsholders are compensated when their works are performed. In Norway, authors are compensated when their books are borrowed from libraries. I think it's more important to develop new compensation schemes in media lacking them than it is to overhaul copyright, which is as much a tool for managing compensation as anything else.

And just as an aside, though it's related, the US and UK are among a very small number of countries where copyright is viewed as fundamentally a practical matter. In most of the world, it's viewed as an inalienable natural right of creators, and this is the view mandated even here by international treaties the US has signed.

It doesn't really matter (to the US) what other countries think. The only thing that matters is what the Constitution says. The Constitution is the highest law of the land, and not even international treaties can override it.

But the reality is content does not make money when given away for free. Newspapers are dead because they gave content away for free on the internet. NY Times has again had to push back its date of profitability and its the freaking NYT. You think the Nashville what ever their local paper is has a chance? Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime make about nothing. The musicians (top selling acts with loyal fan bases) failed with pay what you like.

But under your proposal, I would need to register my copyrights to do these things, and I would need to pay something for it. Do you remember when film cost money? How you always thought twice before snapping? And today you just click away, hoping that one in a hundred of your pictures turn out well (I'm a lousy photographer). Imagine paying $1 for every picture, just so others won't be allowed to copy it. I'm opposed to this suggestion.

For the record, I am 100% behind all of the other recommendations.

I'm wondering if maybe initial copyright should be automatic, but of a modest term, and only renewals require a fee? If 20 years after you wrote a blog post or took a photo, you think it would be valuable to retain the copyright, then you pay the $1. If, as I suspect is often the case, you don't, you don't. I have some writing and such from a decade ago that I still consider valuable--either because I'm still working on it and it hasn't been formally published yet, or because it is in print and continuing to generate revenue. I'm not sure I have anything from 20 years ago that I would bother renewing a copyright on, if I had to.

But the reality is content does not make money when given away for free. Newspapers are dead because they gave content away for free on the internet. NY Times has again had to push back its date of profitability and its the freaking NYT. You think the Nashville what ever their local paper is has a chance? Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime make about nothing. The musicians (top selling acts with loyal fan bases) failed with pay what you like.

Literally everything in that paragraph is wrong.

Where exactly am I wrong?

Netflix super awesome Q1 results (not that far off from the headlines by the way) was a whooping 2.7 million profit on over a billion in revenue.

Hulu does not meet the threshold to require 10 k but given that no one wants to buy it after being shopped around for years should give you a clue on how much profit they are bringing in.

Amazon does not line item Prime but given Netflix numbers, amazon digital sales, and price there is exactly 0 chance this is doing anything but losing money.

Trent Reznor signed back up with a label. Radiohead is singed under the Sony umbrella.

Why should Paris Hilton make money form her Hilton stocks she is not involved in the business in any way.

Because that's how stock ownership works.

Well copyrights work the way they do because that is how it works. You said nothing here. The point I was making if it was not clear enough was stock ownership for corporations is a newer legal framework then Copyrights. It was not until the mid 1800's when corporations lasted longer then say the length of time to build a bridge was widespread. The right for a manufacturer to incorporated only came to the US in 1810 and these laws where not universal until almost 1900. Oh and there is no specific protection for them in the Constitution.

Which really has nothing to do with the length of copyright protection. People create because they need to, and have the ability to create without starving. Even without the protection of copyright, people would still create. The US is richer than China, so it's really not surprising that we create more.

What? The ability to create without starving is because of strong IP laws. Sure you will have a couple of people here and there that do it as a hobby. But you are out of your mind if you think there would be movies, TV, AAA games, or just the widespread number of artist if not for IP laws. JK Rawlings might very well have created the first Harry Potter but in a world without IP laws would she write a second one? Since every publisher would have their edition of Harry Potter out its not like she would be seeing all that much money. WB, Disney and the like could all have their version of the film out with no compensation. Oh and every hack would have their own sequel out watering down the brand.

Which really has nothing to do with the length of copyright protection. People create because they need to, and have the ability to create without starving. Even without the protection of copyright, people would still create. The US is richer than China, so it's really not surprising that we create more.

What? The ability to create without starving is because of strong IP laws. Sure you will have a couple of people here and there that do it as a hobby. But you are out of your mind if you think there would be movies, TV, AAA games, or just the widespread number of artist if not for IP laws. JK Rawlings might very well have created the first Harry Potter but in a world without IP laws would she write a second one? Since every publisher would have their edition of Harry Potter out its not like she would be seeing all that much money. WB, Disney and the like could all have their version of the film out with no compensation. Oh and every hack would have their own sequel out watering down the brand.

But the reality is content does not make money when given away for free. Newspapers are dead because they gave content away for free on the internet. NY Times has again had to push back its date of profitability and its the freaking NYT. You think the Nashville what ever their local paper is has a chance? Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime make about nothing. The musicians (top selling acts with loyal fan bases) failed with pay what you like.

Literally everything in that paragraph is wrong.

Where exactly am I wrong?

Netflix super awesome Q1 results (not that far off from the headlines by the way) was a whooping 2.7 million profit on over a billion in revenue.

Hulu does not meet the threshold to require 10 k but given that no one wants to buy it after being shopped around for years should give you a clue on how much profit they are bringing in.

Amazon does not line item Prime but given Netflix numbers, amazon digital sales, and price there is exactly 0 chance this is doing anything but losing money.

Trent Reznor signed back up with a label. Radiohead is singed under the Sony umbrella.

NYT profits dropped to 2 cents a share from 28 cents Q1 2012.

2.7 million dollars profit means they're still in the black. Why do people think it's necessary for a company to make huge amounts of profit (like 2.7 million isn't huge).

Which really has nothing to do with the length of copyright protection. People create because they need to, and have the ability to create without starving. Even without the protection of copyright, people would still create. The US is richer than China, so it's really not surprising that we create more.

What? The ability to create without starving is because of strong IP laws. Sure you will have a couple of people here and there that do it as a hobby. But you are out of your mind if you think there would be movies, TV, AAA games, or just the widespread number of artist if not for IP laws. JK Rawlings might very well have created the first Harry Potter but in a world without IP laws would she write a second one? Since every publisher would have their edition of Harry Potter out its not like she would be seeing all that much money. WB, Disney and the like could all have their version of the film out with no compensation. Oh and every hack would have their own sequel out watering down the brand.

Kind of like fan fiction, right. It doesn't dilute the brand for people who want the authentic product from the original creator.

Again with Hulu they do not report to the SEC. They reported revenue of 700 million but reportedly also paid a half billion to CBS for content rights. Kind of impossible to see how they are profitable.

But, yes I am more then happy to say there is exactly 0 chance that either Amazon Prime or Hulu are profitable. Given that Apple makes almost nothing on ITunes, Netflix makes almost nothing, and Amazon makes almost nothing on digital sales its a safe bet.

For such a huge success why did Radiohead abandon it again? According to Kroogi a site that has a pay what you want model. Only 20 percent pay and for an average of 3 dollars. Despite not releasing details about In Rainbow they never said it was their most profitable album just it made more money then their previous album. Which should not be a surprise since just the sales of the 40 dollar deluxe version was about half the sales of the previous album.

Which really has nothing to do with the length of copyright protection. People create because they need to, and have the ability to create without starving. Even without the protection of copyright, people would still create. The US is richer than China, so it's really not surprising that we create more.

What? The ability to create without starving is because of strong IP laws. Sure you will have a couple of people here and there that do it as a hobby. But you are out of your mind if you think there would be movies, TV, AAA games, or just the widespread number of artist if not for IP laws. JK Rawlings might very well have created the first Harry Potter but in a world without IP laws would she write a second one? Since every publisher would have their edition of Harry Potter out its not like she would be seeing all that much money. WB, Disney and the like could all have their version of the film out with no compensation. Oh and every hack would have their own sequel out watering down the brand.

Kind of like fan fiction, right. It doesn't dilute the brand for people who want the authentic product from the original creator.

Fan fiction is in its own ghetto. Release half that crap to make a quick buck and see how well that brand lasts.

2.7 million dollars profit means they're still in the black. Why do people think it's necessary for a company to make huge amounts of profit (like 2.7 million isn't huge).[/quote]

LOL. When it takes over a 1,000 million to make 2.7 million you might as call it a rounding error. You can throw that money at Treasuries and make more and they are at historic lows right now. You can put that money in 6 month CDs and make more and they are barely paying.

Furthermore, as I mentioned in at least one other copyright thread, I think that the transference of copyright should be eliminated. The original intent of it was a contract between the public at large and creators of useful works to the public. Publishing houses and record labels have no place in this scheme and have routinely removed the public from the equation--an act which should nullify the contract entirely. If you do not actually put forth the creativity (or scientific research) to develop a useful work, then you do not get to hold the copyright for it. Musicians should all be holding their own copyrights and should be responsible for maintaining them--as a result, they should be getting 100% of the profit from copyrights instead of pathetic pittances offered by record labels as scraps to keep them under contract. Copyright should not be passed down to heirs as the heirs did not create the works.

Agreed. And that includes no corporate ownership of copyright. A person should own every copyright. If they want to license it, that's fine. And I don't see any problem with joint ownership of a copyright by multiple people--and how they work out that joint ownership is up to them (ranging from simply putting all the names down as the copyright owners, to an elaborate contract spelling out duties, responsibilities, distribution of royalties, etc.). But you should be able to take any copyrighted work and find a human being or beings who definitively were the creators and are therefore still the copyright owners.

Would this get complicated for things like movies, where hundreds (thousands?) of people are involved in the creation of a single work of art? Yep. But we're already dealing with assigning a single entity the copyright and working out how the rest of the people are recompensed--the only thing this would change is that instead of the unique copyright holder being an entity whose only relationship to the creative work is financing, it would be an actual person or persons involved in the creative work. Downside: potentially working out a separate contractual relationship for the copyright of each movie. Upside: can have a different contractual relationship for the copyright of each movie, based on how the involved parties see the creative contributions.

Furthermore, as I mentioned in at least one other copyright thread, I think that the transference of copyright should be eliminated. The original intent of it was a contract between the public at large and creators of useful works to the public. Publishing houses and record labels have no place in this scheme and have routinely removed the public from the equation--an act which should nullify the contract entirely. If you do not actually put forth the creativity (or scientific research) to develop a useful work, then you do not get to hold the copyright for it. Musicians should all be holding their own copyrights and should be responsible for maintaining them--as a result, they should be getting 100% of the profit from copyrights instead of pathetic pittances offered by record labels as scraps to keep them under contract. Copyright should not be passed down to heirs as the heirs did not create the works.

Agreed. And that includes no corporate ownership of copyright. A person should own every copyright. If they want to license it, that's fine. And I don't see any problem with joint ownership of a copyright by multiple people--and how they work out that joint ownership is up to them (ranging from simply putting all the names down as the copyright owners, to an elaborate contract spelling out duties, responsibilities, distribution of royalties, etc.). But you should be able to take any copyrighted work and find a human being or beings who definitively were the creators and are therefore still the copyright owners.

How is this better? You are restricting the ability of selling property. You already used the movie example where thousands of people can have a legitimate claim to a piece of the work.

But, the better example is musicians selling their publishing rights. Yes if you are U2 or another person/group that hit it huge but already sold it you got screwed. But, for the vast majority of song writers selling your publishing to a label is worth much more then holding on to them and there really is not a way to tell before hand if you made a mistake or not. For every artist that got screwed selling their publishing there is a 100 that was better off selling.

Which really has nothing to do with the length of copyright protection. People create because they need to, and have the ability to create without starving. Even without the protection of copyright, people would still create. The US is richer than China, so it's really not surprising that we create more.

What? The ability to create without starving is because of strong IP laws. Sure you will have a couple of people here and there that do it as a hobby. But you are out of your mind if you think there would be movies, TV, AAA games, or just the widespread number of artist if not for IP laws. JK Rawlings might very well have created the first Harry Potter but in a world without IP laws would she write a second one? Since every publisher would have their edition of Harry Potter out its not like she would be seeing all that much money. WB, Disney and the like could all have their version of the film out with no compensation. Oh and every hack would have their own sequel out watering down the brand.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.